When I was 21 I took the coach with my best friend from Delhi
to the town of Manali, in the
foothills of the Himalayas. It was the last week of a six-week trip around
India, and we thought of ourselves as hold hands. About six hours into the
journey, the coach began to clamber up treacherous valley passes, where only
one vehicle could go by at a time, so we’d have to pull in and wait for other
vehicles to pass. There were no safety measures there at all – nothing to stop
your coach hurtling off the side into the valley. We saw the burnt out shells
of so many vehicles along the way. It was really terrifying. I did not sleep
for the entire journey, though that might have had something to do with the
Bollywood music the driver played at top volume all through the night, the
other passengers were loving it, but if you’re not used to it, there’s no way
you’ll fall asleep.

Indian coach drivers’ other obsession appears to be with
places that look like Switzerland. They have little pictures of mountainous
hill stations stuck on the dashboard, as if to say that ‘this is heaven on
earth’, alongside icons of deities and gaudy garlands, similar to Christmas
decorations.

The coach drivers do the journey back and forth for three
days, and then have two days off. The only way they can manage it is by getting
really high. So our driver and three of his mates were smoking a chillum, a
pipe packed with cannabis resin and a little of whisky. It was petrifying – he was
swerving the coach all over the place.

When we got up into the hills, the landscape was so
different from what we thought we knew of India. It was full of ravines,
valleys and waterfalls, really craggy and mountainous, with roads clinging to
the sides of mountain passes. Most of India is so populated that you can’t go
anywhere without being surrounded by people but suddenly, as you enter the
Himalayan area, there’s no-one to be seen. And the people there wore much
warmer, more colourful clothes that were obviously homemade, and far more
jewellery-they looked a lot more tribal.

The whole coach journey took about 16 hours, which was
pretty much on schedule. That’s the thing about these drivers-they do get you
there on time, even if they are off their faces. It felt so fantastic getting
off that coach, both because Manali was so beautiful and because I had spent
the entire trio convinced I was going to die. But what an experience!